Tallhamn said in the blog post that the company failed to draw a lead investor “willing to commit enough capital to fill out the round with follow on investors.” His insights are an indicator of the struggles for the entire energy management sector, including potential competitors that Tallhamn used in a slide from the Cleantech Open including Ecofactor, EnergyHub, AlertMe, and Control4.

The investment community’s perspective on this space had become significantly more critical since we got started, and probably for good reasons. A lot of capital has been destroyed in Series A-Z rounds of funding by our competitors, and most investors made it clear that they’d want to see massive traction before committing capital. They were taking a “wait and see” approach.

The business of helping consumers reduce and manage energy consumption in homes and across appliances and devices is such a small market right now, there can’t be too many players going after basically non-existent revenue. OPower, which provides data analytics and software for utilities for energy bills, is one of the few companies in energy management that I know of that is doing well.

Many of the revenues right now depend on scoring utility deals, which can take months and years to implement. Though, there has also been recent attention from the telcos and consumer electronics companies in the energy management space. But as we’ve mentioned pure play energy management gadgets probably won’t be that interesting to consumers — the gadgets will have to do something else, too, like manage your media or run a home security system. Tallhamn said in his blog post: “On a micro level, the average household’s energy costs are so small ($4k on average across electricity and fuel) that any direct to consumer product aiming to reduce them needs to deliver something beyond just savings.”

Hug was taking a free approach, and looking to mine energy information, with Scoble calling Hug the “Mint of your energy bill.” The company had launched a downloadable energy management application for computers that compiled how many minutes your computer slept and basically called your attention to how much energy you were saving. That app was only a “trojan horse” into a plan to grab a greater piece of the energy management sector, and the company’s idea was to start building a user base before the smart energy devices hit the market, “so that we’d be in a great position for becoming the leading supplier of analytics and control software once they had arrived,” writes Tallhamn.

But alas, you can’t build a product without funding. Tallhamn writes:

Knowing when to push through and when to call it quits is probably one of the hardest things for an entrepreneur, and while I’ll never know for sure, I feel quite confident that this was the right decision for everyone involved.

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For those keeping track at home, that kind of revenue growth is pretty fantastic, but not terribly surprising. After all, YouTube serves more than 2 billion videos a day, including more than 100 million a day on mobile devices. And the site has very aggressively ramped up advertising over the past year, placing more ads against partner videos and those that run on mobile devices.

Pichette didn’t state revenue numbers, but doubling growth is not totally out of line with previous analyst projections. Barclay’s Capital analyst Doug Anmuth estimated that YouTube pulled in $450 million in revenues during 2009. While Anmuth’s forecast last January called for 55 percent growth, others were less conservative. Last March, Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney estimated that YouTube would generate nearly $1 billion in sales for the full year.

While doubling revenue is a plus, it’s important to note that Pichette said nothing about YouTube’s profitability. The question of when the online video site would finally turn a profit has been much debated over the past several years. Despite forecasts early last year that YouTube could become profitable in 2010, it seems that the unit — which Google paid $1.65 billion for back in 2006 — still isn’t in the black.

Coincidentally, the Google call was hosted on YouTube and suffered from some pretty dramatic stuttering and lag, which is surprising in part because it was audio-only.

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Coskata has gotten a letter of intent from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a $250 million loan guarantee to build a plant to make ethanol from woody biomass. The plant will have the capacity to make 55 million gallons per year. Coskata’s plant plans seriously stalled during the recession, and Coskata has been waiting for this loan guarantee to come through. The company is well-known for touting a $1 per gallon production price and its backers including Khosla Ventures, General Motors, and Advanced Technology Ventures.

The USDA also awarded Enerkem a conditional commitment for an $80 million loan guarantee to build a 10 million-gallon-per-year refinery for making ethanol out of municipal solid waste. Enerkem, which uses a thermochemical trash-to-syngas process, was already awarded a $50 million Department of Energy grant, and also raised funding from trash giant Waste Management, Cycle Capital, Rho Ventures, Braemar Energy Ventures and BDR Capital.

At the same time, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is awarding a $241 million loan guarantee — its first for a biofuel plant — to Diamond Green Diesel. The guarantee will help Valero build a plant in Louisiana that will make 137 million gallons of biofuel per year primarily from animal fats and used cooking oil.

The USDA said it’s not done doling out financial help to biofuel producers. It plans to announce new rules “soon” that will make more money available from the loan guarantee program, which originated from a 2008 Farm Bill.

Lining up money to build refineries has been a huge hurdle for a slew of biofuel companies in the past two years. The recession is only partly to blame. Many of these companies have encountered technical problems for converting plants and wastes into fuel. Investors once flocked to these startup companies, especially when the federal government announced goals to gradually increase the nation’s supply of renewable fuel until it hits 36 billion in 2022.

Well, hitting the goals has proven a lot more difficult. Congress initially set 100 million gallons as the 2010 target for cellulosic biofuel, but the Environmental Protection Agency cut that to 6.5 million gallons. It appears the industry might have produced less than 1 million gallons last year, reported ClimateWire, citing an estimate by a government analyst.

Just last week, reports emerged that Range Fuels, backed by venture capital firms such as Khosla Ventures, was laying off workers and shutting down its refinery in Georgia in order to tackle technical problems and raise more money. Colorado-based Range Fuels received an $80 million loan guarantee from the USDA to help fund its refinery, which began production by making methanol instead of ethanol last year.

Perhaps the USDA will see quicker success from its latest bets. Aside from Coskata and Enerkem, the agency also touted a loan guarantee conditional commitment for a $75 million loan guarantee to INEOS Bio and its partner New Planet Energy, which it first announced a few weeks ago.

INEOS Bio (which is the biofuel arm of petrochemical giant INEOS) and developer New Planet Energy say they will use the loan guarantee to build the “INEOS BioEnergy Center,” near Vero Beach, Florida, that will produce 8 million gallons of advanced biofuels and 6 MW of biomass power from plant waste and trash per year. The companies say the center will begin producing biofuels and bioenergy in 2012, and will create 175 jobs during the construction process and 50 jobs when the center is completed.

Loan guarantees are important awards for companies looking to build plants for these next-gen biofuel projects. A loan guarantee essentially is a promise by the government to back a loan if the company can’t pay it, and it enables companies to finance projects with a better interest rate and at a lower cost.

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The Agua Caliente project will use panels from First Solar, is set for completion in 2014 and is supposed to create 400 construction jobs. Northern California utility PG&E plans to buy the electricity from the project. NRG plans to invest up to $800 million in equity in the project, and the deal between First Solar and NRG requires that First Solar installs, operates and maintains the project.

This is the third big round of DOE loan guarantees for the solar industry. Last summer, the DOE awarded close to $2 billion in loan guarantees to Spanish solar company Abengoa Solar and Colorado-based solar panel maker Abound Solar. Abengoa Solar was awarded a $1.45 billion loan guarantee to help it build Solana, a solar thermal, trough-based, solar farm that is under contract to sell power to Arizona utility APS in Gila Bend, Arizona. BrightSource also received a $1.37 billion loan guarantee to build out BrightSource’s Ivanpah solar project, which is the first new solar thermal power plant being built in California’s deserts in 20 years.

Loan guarantees essentially serve as a promise by the government to make good on a loan if the company can’t, and typically enable better interest rates and lower costs than would otherwise be available to a company for project financing. As DOE Loan Chief Jonathan Silver told us recently, it takes about six months “soup to nuts” to get these applications processed and finalized.

These types of solar projects make sense for the DOE loan guarantee program, because these are the first projects from some of these solar firms in the U.S. The idea is to get a company like BrightSource across the so-called “valley of death,” between proving the technology and building out and scaling up actual plants. Solar projects also offer construction jobs and good press.

Silver told us recently that the “first couple biofuels deals” will be announced “shortly” for the loan guarantee program, and that biofuels will likely be among the next several loan guarantees issued. In the coming year, he said, we’re also likely to see “additional interest” in nuclear and “advanced fossil fuel technologies,” such as “clean coal” and carbon capture.

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Since the screws aren’t readily compatible with any standard screwdriver that a user may have (unlike the Phillips screws they replace), users wanting to crack the case on their own devices and effect repairs at home will be out of luck. On the iPhone and MacBook Air, the new screws will make it harder to get any access to the internals of either device at all, and on the MacBook Pro, they protect the battery, making it even trickier to replace.

The new screw type, called “Pentalobe” because of its five-pointed design, is not proprietary (used and licensed by Apple alone), but it is something you’re unlikely to find just by rummaging through your toolbox or running down to your local hardware store. In fact, iFixit reports that there isn’t even a reputable consumer channel for the exact screwdriver Apple’s own technicians use to handle Pentalobe screws, so users will have to settle for best-fit solutions. You can see iFixit’s video explaining the screws at length below.

Note also that while early iPhone 4 models shipped with standard four-point Phillips screws, if you’ve had your phone serviced recently or are planning to, Apple’s service staff will replace those with the new Pentalobe versions while repairing the device. That swap makes this new screw look like a means to well, screw consumers.

There are two possible explanations for the new screws. First, there’s the line Apple will probably take, if the company comments at all (no response received as of press time): that the screws help prevent against potentially dangerous tampering that would do more harm than good. In other word, the “we’re protecting you against yourselves” argument.

The other explanation is the one that iFixit (which admittedly makes much of its money selling DIY repair kits for Apple devices) is convinced is the real reason: that Apple wants you to buy upgrades and replacements, so it’s making it as hard as possible to repair its products yourself at home. This is definitely in keeping with Apple’s current product design trajectory. The culmination of this new design philosophy seems to be the iPad, which offers no easy internal access, can’t have its storage or RAM upgraded. Apple is approaching the same model in its notebook line with the latest MacBook Air, which now also features the tamper-resistant Pentalobe screws in addition to non-upgradable RAM soldered to the logic board, and a non-standard implementation of flash storage that makes it very hard to replace.

Apple’s newest, more closed designs arguably allow them to make improvements in terms of battery life, system efficiency and physical device size, but they also sacrifice a lot in terms of a user’s ability to customize and repair the devices on their own. The use of these screws, however, doesn’t come with a functional benefit to offset its downsides. Is it a step too far?

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Liquavista displays reduce power consumption much like the Pixel Qi screens currently found in the Notion Ink Adam tablet and Qualcomm’s promising Mirasol display technology. Instead of the standard option of using a backlight to brighten the display, a Liquavista screen has three options: reflective, transmissive and transflective. Indoors, the screen can act just like a traditional LCD display while outdoors, natural light can be reflected through the pixels for clarity and brightness, without a backlight consuming any power. Transmissive is the typical backlit technology LCDs have used for years, while using natural, passive light for reflective displays is a more recent development. Transflective both reflects and transmits light as needed to save power while still displaying a high-quality image.

So Liquavista has both a power-efficient solution and is outdoor-friendly. But how can an e-Ink type of display be used on mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets? The company says its electrowetting technology can refresh a screen up to 60 times per second, opening the door to the high frame rates needed for gaming, video consumption and other media activities on a handheld device. An early prototype Liquavista display was filmed by the BBC last year, and about halfway through the video, you can see a few examples of full-screen, color video playback.

Such frame-rates open the door for Samsung to incorporate Liquavista’s electrowetting technology into handsets, which could help boost battery life. Samsung currently uses its Super AMOLED technology in its Galaxy S line of smartphones, the Nexus S, and its two Windows Phone 7 devices. Super AMOLED is also a power-efficient technology, but can’t leverage the outdoor properties of Liquavista’s screens, so future Samsung handsets could look just as good outside as they do indoors, if not better.

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Lovefilm operates a business very similar to Netflix in Europe, offering subscriptions to a DVD-by-mail service and a streaming video service for a low monthly fee. The company has about 70,000 DVD and Blu-ray titles available by mail and about 7,500 films for streaming, compared to about 100,000 discs and 20,000 streaming titles available on Netflix. Like Netflix, Lovefilm is also expanding the availability of its streaming offering to be viewable on TVs, Blu-ray players, and other connected devices like the PlayStation 3. And last month, Lovefilm rolled out its streaming service to Germany, a new market for its over-the-top offering.

The acquisition shouldn’t come as a complete surprise; after all, Amazon already had a significant stake in Lovefilm prior to today’s announcement, and had reportedly been interested in buying out the remainder for quite some time. Amazon got that stake after Lovefilm acquired Amazon’s DVD rental business in 2008. Amazon also bought out one of Lovefilm’s venture backers to give it a 42-percent stake in the subscription video firm.

Amazon had long been rumored to have an interest in acquiring Netflix, as a way to supplement its online video-on-demand service with a subscription rental offering. But despite years of rumors, Amazon missed an opportunity to buy Netflix on the cheap, since Netflix stock has shot up over the last year, rising more than 250 percent in that time and giving it a market cap of almost $10 billion.

Speaking of Netflix, Amazon’s acquisition of Lovefilm comes not long after Netflix introduced its streaming service in Canada: its first international market. And after what it sees as a successful rollout there, Netflix has been making noise lately about accelerating its international push and entering new markets this year. That could mean that Netflix might soon launch in the UK, facing off against Lovefilm head-to-head.

At the same time, there’s the possibility that Amazon could bring Lovefilm’s offerings stateside. While the firm’s content seems to focus on the European market, Amazon has been looking to compete with Netflix directly, and reportedly had been pitching studios to operate its own subscription streaming business in the U.S. Using Lovefilm’s existing studio relationships and Amazon’s own cloud-based infrastructure, Amazon could possibly accelerate its subscription video plans and introduce a Netflix-like service here.

All that said, the two also have a somewhat symbiotic relationship, as Netflix is a huge Amazon Web Services (AWS) customer. Since announcing that it was moving to the cloud last year, Netflix has increasingly relied on AWS to power the backend infrastructure behind its streaming business, and may be one reason why Amazon recently increased file object size for its Simple Storage Service.

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Silicon Valley startup Law Pivot announced new funding and a new recommendation feature for its Quora-like Q&A service that aims to democratize access to quality legal advice. According to Nitin Gupta, Law Pivot co-founder and VP of business development, the new recommendation feature will add value to the service by helping companies target their queries to lawyers that best match their needs. Even before today’s news, though, Law Pivot has defied the odds by gaining traction in a notoriously technology-resistant profession.

Law Pivot targets technology startups without large legal budgets by letting them pose questions via the web service, which are then answered by Law Pivot’s stable of qualified lawyers. It all sounds great, although Gupta himself — a former lawyer — acknowledges that the legal industry is typically among the last to adopt new technologies. An ongoing shift away from the traditional billable-hours model was accelerated by the economic downturn, however, and now Gupta says “[L]aw firms are realizing that they have to change their ways.”

According to Gupta, Law Pivot has attracted participation from many skilled attorneys, including senior partners at large firms. He attributes the interest to the fact that Law Pivot allows lawyers to expose themselves to new clients more efficiently, as opposed to traditional methods such as attending networking events or doing speaking engagements. Many lawyers have begun to drum up new business by answering questions on Quora and LinkedIn, he says, but Law Pivot gives them the opportunity to do so in a confidential, controlled manner. And when Law Pivot ultimately starts charging for the service, the attorneys will get paid, too.

In this case, what’s good for lawyers is also good for startups. Customers, which include Ooyala and TweetSwirl, can get multiple answers to their questions for a fraction of the price it normally would cost and can establish long-term relationships with an attorney without the legwork normally associated with finding legal counsel.

I asked Gupta about a handful of ethical considerations — including conflict of interest and malpractice liability — that could negatively affect the quality of Law Pivot’s service, but he didn’t seem too concerned. He explained that attorneys understand the rules around concerns, and know that they need to take the appropriate steps to mitigate them, just like they would with in-person client consultations. Another issue that could arise revolves around payment for attorneys, as it’s possible they won’t prioritize Law Pivot questions when more-pressing or higher-paying work awaits with actual clients. For now, though, Gupta says everybody seems happy with the arrangement.

In addition to the recommendation features, Law Pivot announced $200,000 in additional funding, bringing its total to $600,000. The new money comes from Google Ventures and a handful of angel investors.

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UPDATED. Flash-based game site Kongregrate found itself excluded from the Android Market today, but it’s still trying to figure out whether its exile is going to be permanent and if so, why it’s being singled out. The gaming site launched the Kongregate Arcade app earlier today, only to have it yanked after Google reportedly said that it violated the non-compete rules in the Android Market terms of service. Essentially, Google seems to be suggesting that Kongregate Arcade is a competing app store.

According to Jim Greer, the CEO of Kongregate — which was recently bought by GameStop — the Arcade may look like an app store, but it’s actually a web browser that connects to the Kongregate site, Greer told VentureBeat. In this way, the app allows users access to hundreds of free games and allows them to cache those games for offline play.

“It does seem like a pretty extreme distortion to call something that plays content in a browser to be the same thing as an application store,” Greer said. “By this definition, we don’t see why apps like the Kindle or other music apps aren’t across the line.”

Greer told Joystiq that he was confused and shocked, and said the decision to call Kongregate Arcade an app store was a “pretty extreme stretch.” Greer said he previously showed the app to people at Google, who were enthusiastic about having it available in Android Market, though he said they weren’t involved in the decision. He’s holding out hope that Google erred in its exclusion of the app, saying it already allows some game emulators that include hundreds of games.

I’ve reached out to Google for comment and hope to hear back soon. It’s possible that this could all be a misunderstanding — although VentureBeat seems to think that Google may be motivated by a desire to make room for its own gaming efforts. If this decision stands, it does strike a blow to Google’s arguments about how open Android is. That’s been a favorite talking point of Google executives in drawing a distinction between Android and iOS. Apple has taken its lumps on numerous occasions for denying apps for a variety of reasons though it has made efforts to be more transparent lately.

Denying Kongregate wouldn’t do any favors to Android’s reputation as a weak gaming platform compared to the iPhone. The platform is slowly getting bigger titles like Angry Birds, but it’s still not a priority for game developers. And while technically the app store competition argument may apply to Kongregate, it raises the question about what Google will do with other apps like Kindle that offer similar services.

Kongregate is still being promoted through GameStop and being sold through GetJar, which is able to sell games direct to Android users. That is still a nice distinction for Android, which allows third-party app stores to sell apps. But until the Kongregate app rejection is sorted out or the rejection proves to be a mistake, it leaves a lot of questions about the role Google is taking in Android Market.

UPDATE: Google responded with a statement standing by its decision to pull the Kongragate Arcade app. “Applications in violation of our policies are removed from Android Market,” Google said. The reasoning comes down to the fact that the Kongregate app, while it acts much like a browser, has the ability to cache games for offline play. That elevates it into a competing software distribution platform offering outside content, something the Android Market terms of service prohibits. It’s likely that a simpler app that listed Kongregate games and launched a traditional browser could get approved. Or if the games were submitted as individual apps, they would also fly. It seems a distinction is being made here between digital content like books or music and mobile apps, which is why Kindle and other services don’t appear to be in danger of being pulled.

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“We are working hard with our U.S. carrier partners to bring meaningful smartphone solutions to market that are compelling consumer experiences, have strong operator support and a thriving ecosystem. As in any business, plans can change and deliberate decisions must be made to enable clear focus on bringing the right products to market at the right time.”

From the sounds of the statement, and given that Nokia hasn’t gained traction here in the U.S. with its Symbian devices, it appears to me that Nokia and AT&T couldn’t agree on the financial details of a carrier deal. Conversations may have ended a February launch, but Nokia appears open to revisiting a deal with AT&T — or perhaps the other big GSM operator, T-Mobile — to get its current high-end smartphones in front of consumers at a price competitive to iPhones and Android handsets.

The situation, if true, also tells me that AT&T is confident enough with its current and planned phone portfolio. Yes, the carrier is losing iPhone exclusivity in a few short weeks, but AT&T has solid Android offerings including the new Motorola Atrix 4G, which can fit in a laptop-like dock or pump 1080p video to a high-definition television set.

I actually had high hopes that Nokia would be able to work with AT&T to carry one of the new Symbian devices announced at Nokia World in September. A developer contest held by Nokia tipped off the possibility of a new Nokia device on AT&T, mainly because AT&T was a key sponsor. Now it looks like that plan has either fallen through or been postponed, at best. And that hurts Nokia because its Symbian devices aren’t subsidized, nor do they receive any marketing attention here in the States. This means most consumers don’t know about them, and when they do find out that Nokia has something to offer, they’re put off by prices of $500 or more.

Based on my prior conversations with key Nokia executives, I suspect this is just another set-back, and not a completely closed door. The U.S. market is extremely important to Nokia, I was told back in June by Niklas Savander, EVP and general manager of the markets unit at Nokia. If AT&T won’t play nice with Nokia, then perhaps the largest handset maker in the world in terms of sales can get T-Mobile to offer subsidized Symbian smartphones.

I think the devices have excellent hardware designs, but are lacking in usability. If Nokia can get a carrier to work with them, it will be up to U.S. consumers to pass their own judgment in a world of iPhones and Androids.

Image courtesy of Eldar Murtazin

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